How the mastery of energy and space could enable civilization to rise to a higher level, which will be dubbed here as "Kardashevian Aspirations". A higher level of civilization could mean peace, prosperity and freedom for all, but you never know. (Somebody might find a way to screw it up.)

Friday, November 25, 2011

Nuclear Cement

In the recent Nuclear Ammonia article post, ammonia was illustrated as a fuel that could propel vehicles in a zero carbon era.

Using nuclear heat and power, chemical engineers can design plants to synthesize CHx fuels from any carbon source.

Project Green Freedom is conceived by Jeffrey Martin and William Kubic of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The idea is to use a nuclear power plant to provide the energy to synthesize fuel, and use the air flow of the cooling towers as a source for carbon from CO2 that makes up about 0.035% of the atmosphere.

The lime cycle has been used to make mortar for construction for millennia.

This process is the conception of Darryl Siemer, a retired nuclear chemist from Idaho National Labs. Heat from a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) would be transferred to the kilns to heat the sand and limestone.

The process would be carbon neutral, because the fuel synthesized and eventually burned would release CO2 into the atmosphere that would be absorbed by cement hardening as it is used in construction.

Comment: This reminds me of what I wroteaboutbefore. You can do better than carbon neutral with this, you can go carbon negative if you can recapture the carbon and recycle it. Thus you will close the carbon cycle and be more efficient in the use of energy as well.

Here's another video with Kirk Sorensen discussing a lot of the history of nuclear power and Thorium's place in it. He explains what went wrong and how it might be corrected.

The title of it is called "LFTR in 5 Minutes - THORIUM REMIX 2011", but it is about 2 hours long, so watch the first 5 minutes if you are in a hurry. On the other hand, if you have the time, it is well worth watching the entirety of the video.